Normally I don't feel the need to respond to your blog, as you've said all I want to already, but this one hit a chord quite close to home, one that I find all the more worrying due to my relatively young age. I used to build computers for fun, eat operating systems for breakfast, devour hardware specs for lunch and then go out and fix goodness knows what problem joe public had managed to conjure up. I never really got into programming, but that was more due to my natural disdain for languages in general. Nonetheless, I still picked them up as I went along. RegExps, however, are the spawn of Satan. I never got them, and I doubt I ever will. I did tech support for what felt a lifetime. By the end, there was nothing new, nothing that could surprise me. I actually had seen it all. My brain was perpetually free-wheeling. I never had to think on how to solve a problem. Couple that with the sheer idiocy of the general public when having to actually help them with something and even trying to shoot myself in the head would've been hopeless; there was nothing left to damage. I'm now off work ill long term - another victim of NHS hospital "cleanliness". I had long ago decided to join the RAF, and I was well on my way until I was struck down with MRSA. Now that I've been completely inactive for so long, added with not really having used my brain properly for years prior, I feel that same thing you do when trying to study anything that requires my brain to actually function. I have to read over everything 2, 3 times before it actually sinks in. My vocabulary has gone to hell too - I can never find the word I'm looking for by the time it comes to speak it, and it usually leaves me just trailing off in the middle of a.. ehm... eh... yeah. That drives me up the bloody wall! Unfortunately when you get to this stage, your brain is so atrophied that it becomes a vicious circle. Learning becomes the absolute last thing that your mind wants, that would have to strain your brain, and it's already strained enough from the repetitiveness of your daily life! It's just the same as normal exercise. I say this, and I know it to be true, and I speak them as if they are words of wisdom that I can impart upon you. But the truth is, I'm no different. I'm still stuck in this repetitiveness, trying to find something that will gently ease me out of it, but I know that will never come. I'm going to have to just buckle up my will and start learning something new on my own again, like I did when the inside of a computer was still a new and fascinating frontier to me. It's going to take grabbing a reference book I'm interested in and bloody well reading the damn thing instead of swapping it for a Tom Clancy novel every second page. Heh, we should become "brain gym" partners, you and I.